| DAYS IN A DAY | by Une Heure Cinq constructs a story through snippets in Flash. Brown, a primate with an existential crisis, wanders through a city or “monkeys in an anthill”.”When I was young I would have never imagined to belong to an insects society, I wanted to be a mountains gorilla.”

Intellext‘s Watson runs silently runs and retrieves searches based on an analysis of what your doing at the time. Imagine typing a paper and having your research assistant constantly looking over your shoulder to go find more information on whatever topics come across in your discourse. That’s Watson. [download Watson 2.0 beta]

Search engines are like poking sticks used to blindly probing a vast sea of information. A map might help. Much of information visualization stems on its capacity to convey large amounts of information through our relatively low bandwidth eye-mind coordination. The Places & Spaces exhibition displays a variety of new and old info vis designs and methods that attempt to visualize and manage floods of physical and abstract data.

How could playing poker online ever become fair? The enforcement of no-teams and no-bots are hard to regulate. As AI becomes more sophisticated, we may eventually face the killer bot, capable of defeating champion poker players. Online poker sites have two choices: fight the bots or embrace them. And why wouldn’t they embrace them? Poker bots still pay the rake for each pot, so the online casino continue to flourish. Who knows? Online poker may turn into a virtual battlefield for AI.

Pyron Solar Inc.‘s (San Diego, CA) new Pyron Solar Electric Generator, runs at less than $3 per Watt with 1/4 to 1/20 the size of other systems. Pyron’s system works by concentrating direct sunlight 400X into its photovoltaic cells. Projections by Pyron estimate possible costs for large power plants at $1.24 per Watt and enough efficiency to power the entire US with a 50 square mile plot of land in the desert southwest.

A similar idea, at a larger scale, is being researched by Materialab (at RPI) as a curtain wall system with embedded Fresnel lenses that track and concentrate sunlight into PV cells. [article]

Prophecy Magazine is an internationally distributed bi-annual magazine of architecture, art, fashion, music + culture. Each issue of Prophecy features theoretical architectural ideas/renderings in “the Lab” section. This section usually features 3-5 projects. They are currently accepting submissions to be included in Fall ’05 issue (August 15th Deadline). [Prophecy Magazine : the Lab]